Comment

Cold comfort charm

Whether it's the rough seas of Peter Weir's Master and Commander or the jittery camera-work and abrupt cuts of Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams, you'd better take Dramamine if you go to the movies in the US this holiday season. Better yet, throw an antidepressant and maybe an inhaler into your movie survival kit.

The makers and distributors of movies, having figured out that we want grim and depressing at this time of year, are determined to offset Yuletide cheer with the dark and foreboding. This trend, evidenced in last year's gloomfest (The Hours, Gangs of New York, The Pianist and an Oscar-winning musical whose major set is a prison), has reached critical mass in a late-autumn lineup that has even us diehard reviewers and cinephiles - by definition, the most jaded gluttons for stylish punishment - warning readers and friends to expect more than usual levels of blood and gore and suffering, physical and psychological. So far, viewers aren't complaining. Maybe we should be grateful that Mel Gibson's controversial crucifixion epic, The Passion, reportedly the most violent film about Christ ever made, isn't going to enjoy a Christmas release.

Why the need to feel bad, when most people are doing relatively well? In the 1930s, working-class people, many on relief, flocked to movies where Park Avenue swells wined and dined in style. Now, in the same esprit de contradiction, we apparently need to do penance for the excesses and indulgences of the season - too much getting and spending, too much good luck in being alive while others are struggling and dying. These downbeat movies offer a framed, manageable and time-limited correlative for all that's malignant, vague and unending in a world spiralling out of control.

Tired of feminist triumphalism? In Sylvia, the American poet Sylvia Plath (an uncanny Gwyneth Paltrow) voluptuously embraces her own destruction, first in the form of her demonic poet-husband, Ted Hughes, then in the arms of her final lover, death. At least she left a blazing legacy. Which is more than can be said for the sexually masochistic, zombie-like sisters in In the Cut.

Although the tall ship skirmishes in Master and Commander feel less like war than the lusty, murderous fun of a World Cup soccer match, the real shudders come when Paul Bettany's ship doctor is accidentally shot. As Russell Crowe's Captain Aubrey looks on with manly sympathy, Bettany does surgery on himself ("Move the mirror so I can see my kidney").

But this is child's play compared to the prolonged night-of-the-living-dead fugue that is 21 Grams, due to come out in the UK in March. A gaunt, hollow-eyed Sean Penn spends a large part of the film hooked up to tubes, lying on a gurney; Naomi Watts an equal amount of time in bathrooms sniffing coke (pre- and post-idyllic marriage), while Benicio Del Toro's ex-con alternates between bouts of uncontrollable rage and hectoring, born-again pieties. This supercharged and willfully harrowing tale of intersecting lives brought together through a car accident hollowly repeats the more organically felt formula of Iñárritu's first film, Amores Perros. Even the look of 21 Grams - cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto's deliberately desaturated palette of oxygen-starved monochromes and hospital-at-midnight pallor - is enough to send you diving for your sunlamp.

The Missing and Mystic River are also sagas of rippling and contagious misery, their characters locked in mutual bitterness and despair. In the former, a western set in late-19th-century New Mexico, an estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones) and daughter (Cate Blanchett), mired in mutual antagonism, set out to find Blanchett's daughter, abducted by Comanches, before she can be sold into slavery for Mexican bordellos.

Mystic River, Clint Eastwood's tale of abduction, murder and revenge in a blue-collar section of Boston, seems, like so many other recent movies, to undercut its own purported horror at man's violence and bloodshed with irresistible - hence celebratory - scenes of brutality. Possibly the most shocking scene has Laura Linney, Sean Penn's heretofore mutely supportive wife, turning into Lady Macbeth, urging her husband to stay the bloody course necessary to maintain his position as master and commander of their tribal Boston backwater.

Is it an expression of subversive anti-Americanism or just a coincidence that in two films, stars play characters who defect to the "other side"? In The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones's grizzled warrior has become an Indian in all but blood. And in The Last Samurai, our most American-as-apple-pie actor, Tom Cruise, falls in love with Japanese warrior ways and becomes a renegade from the American army. Just having been American ensures that he will fight like hell.

In Veronica Guerin, Cate Blanchett's fiery journalist gets shot, beaten and finally killed by the drug lords she has been exposing in a Dublin newspaper. The darkness of this movie, based on the real-life story of the Irish martyr, is not just in its graphic violence but the ambivalence we're bound to feel toward this woman and her obsession, her need to be a hero at the expense of life and family. Blanchett is sensational, yet the film has been all but ignored - perhaps because the noble but madly reckless crusade that wins approval for men makes us uneasy when undertaken by a woman.

For truly inspired nastiness, a movie that scrapes the treacle off the Christmas tarts and comes full circle with a kind of redemption, Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa is the one to see. Billy Bob Thornton is brilliantly repellent as a depressed, alcoholic, obscenity-spouting, safe-cracking department store Santa, the anti-Elf. With his little African-American helper (literally - Tony Cox's Marcus is a midget) to keep him on the job, Willie can barely sit up in Santa's chair, much less provide a welcoming knee for the kiddies. He's rude and snickering to the little tots (many of whom deserve it): the only way Willie could be worse is if he were played by Michael Jackson.

Produced by the Coen brothers, and with an all-round splendid cast of characters who give as good as they get, this perverted, twisted yet deeply satisfying ode to seasonal dystopia captures the distress we all feel during a holiday whose crassness and blandly pandering "family" films leave an aching void beneath the noise and glitter.

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